Comments Experiment Over

The Open ID experiment is over. It was always intended to be temporary. I hope that people understood the point, and will be respectful. I am asking, because it's annoying to me, as well as to others, not only to have rude and hostile comments with little substantive value [and sometimes none], but also to have to look at an entire thread with many commentors posting as anonymous and not leaving a tag because you can't tell who is posting more than once, or replying to what. Go ahead and post as anonymous, but please leave a tag [e.g. big blue fish] in the header/body of your post. If we continue to have a severe problem with trolls, I will go with Open ID permanently. But I do prefer to make it easy for people to comment without having to really login to anything. I want us all to behave like adults. So have fun, but be respectful.

For those interested, response both here, and elsewhere [including offline] was mixed, but mostly supportive for the Open ID thing. Personally, I hate that kind of stuff and would only move to it as a last resort. I just wanted to give people pause. For the few people that raised censorship related issues [no one raised it head on], I don't advocate censorship, but this effort wasn't about censorship, just about making people consider how much they really wanted to post that crazy rant. In all my time running this blog I think I've deleted 4 comments since late 2004 [one was defamatory, and three were racist/homophobic with no redeeming value at all] that weren't just spam/duplicates. I don't know how many comments Frozen Tropics has received, but this is WAY less than 1 percent of the total. I believe in the free flow of information. I just hope people will think before they post.